This is a “how long is a piece of string?” type of question – it depends on the portrait type, genre, and quality of the portrait. It also depends on other photographic parameters and could be posed in a more generic way such as “Are wide-angle lenses too wide for portraits?”
The 21mm lens is not too wide for portraits but is definitely not the best lens for all portraits. There are, however, portraits where it can be a better solution than other lenses. After a few words on how to choose a lens especially if you are buying your first camera, we will look at the characteristics of the wide-angle lens and see where its strengths and weaknesses lie.
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Can I capture flattering portraits with a 21mm lens?
While a 21mm lens is a great lens for environmental portraits, you may find it challenging to click flattering close-up shots of your subject with it. If you get really close, your subject’s nose and forehead will appear bigger and uninteresting.
NOTE: The focal lengths quoted in this article are those for a 35mm camera and need to be divided by a crop factor to give the equivalent focal lengths on other cameras.
How to choose a 21mm lens for portraiture?
An efficient way to choose your lens when buying your first camera is to buy a zoom lens covering a range from wide-angle to telephoto. Zoom lenses are more complex and expensive than prime lenses with a fixed focal length.
The zoom lens will have a larger minimum aperture which means it will not be able to shoot in as low light as a wide-angle prime lens. It will also produce images of lower sharpness and quality as you will tend to have to use apertures closer to the lens’s minimum aperture or shoot at higher ISO both of which affect print quality adversely.
It is worth noting though that these are generalizations and that a really high-quality zoom lens can outperform a normal wide-angle lens in all but price.
Portrait photography aims at capturing the personality, character, and emotions. It can either be candid or artistic. Portrait photography requires more than just the ability to understand your camera settings, lighting, and composition.
You must also possess the ability to connect with your subjects and capture their unique qualities. So, it is a difficult but rewarding genre of photography.
Click Below to read a comprehensive guide to learning and mastering the art of portrait photography.
Getting to know the 21mm wide-angle lens
With the zoom you can then experiment. For instance, find a person or even a statue in a park that you can photograph with various focal lengths to establish the characteristics of portraits taken with the zoom set to 21mm.
Characteristics of 21mm wide angle lens
As well as having lots of examples of camera settings for portraits with an example of what they produce you should notice the following characteristics.
- The 21 mm lens has a wide field of view of just over 90 degrees. which makes it ideal for vast landscapes where you want large areas of the sky, horizon, and foreground in the image.
- The detail in such a vast landscape and any person not purposely posed near the camera will not be well defined.
- The large aperture allows images with out-of-focus backgrounds that direct attention to the subject. The larger aperture also allows higher-quality images in lower light conditions.
- Because of the wide angle of view, the subject has to be very close to the camera for torso or headshots. This can have a negative effect on the naturalness of the photo because of awkwardness in posing. It also distorts perspective which tends to have unflattering effects in a portrait, such as expanding the eyes and nose and shrinking the head. On the other hand, there are times when distortion is part of the image. If necessary distortion can be corrected in post-processing.
But remember that these are not specific to a 21mm lens but rather somewhat more obvious and harder to avoid in shorter lenses.
A great simulation of the interaction between camera, camera settings, depth of field, and field of view developed by Michael Bemowski is useful in improving your understanding of how interrelated everything is and visualizing the final effect.
If at the end of it you find the 21mm doesn’t match the portraits you want to produce you will have learned what lens or range of lenses does and whether you need to move to a more expensive quality lens or stick with your zoom lens..
Effect of Type of Portrait
Close-up head
With a 21 mm lens the wide angle of view requires that the camera is very close to the subject. As well as being unsettling and reducing the naturalness of the pose this effects perspective and causes distortion which tends to enlarge parts that are closer to the lens.
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Head and shoulders
Having to move away from the subject to include the torso makes for more relaxed shooting giving more natural poses and reducing the magnitude of the distortion.
Full body in front of the environment or building
This is probably the ideal portrait for which to use a 21 mm lens. By placing the person in the middle of the image, keeping the camera in a plane parallel to the sensor and shooting in portrait mode, the person will not be distorted while the wide angle of the lens will show plenty of the scene.
Street photography
Because street photography has to be quick and there is limited time to create a rapport between subject and photographer a telephoto is often the chosen lens. However, if the shot depends on a very wide view of the background with a very small subject a wide angle could be ideal because of its ease of use.
At the end of the day, it’s difficult to find any hard and fast rules because there are so many parameters that vary more uor less continually. So we definitely couldn’t say a 21mm is too wide for portrait photography and in fact if you are looking to click a portrait where you want lots of detail in the background the 21 mm is a great choice. Generally the type of portrait you are taking determines the lens you choose.